James K. Baxter

As I come down the hill from Toro Poutini’s house My feet are sore, being bare, on the sharp stones And that is a suitable penance. The dust of the pa road Is cool, though, and I can see The axe of the moon shift down behind the trees Very slowly. The red light from the windows Of the church has a ghostly look, and in This place ghosts are real. The bees are humming loudly In moonlight in their old hive above the church door Where I go in to kneel, and come out to make my way Uphill past a startled horse who plunges in the paddock Above the nunnery. Now there are one or two Of the tribe back in the big house—What would you have me do, King Jesus? Your games with me have turned me into a boulder.

To lie on a beach after looking at old poems: how slow untroubled by any grouch of mine or yours, Father Ocean tumbles in the bay alike with solitary divers, cripples, yelling girls and pipestem kids. He does what suits us all; and somewhere — there, out there, where the high tight sails are going — he wears a white death flag of foam for us, far out, for when we want it. So on Gea’s breast, the broad nurse who bears with me, I think of adolescence: that sad boy I was, thoughts crusted with ice on the treadmill of self-love, Narcissus damned, who yet brought like a coal in a hallow stalk, the seed of fire that runs through my veins now. I praise that sad boy now, who having no hope, did not blow out his brains.